Ozone
The Environmental Agenda of a Second-Term Obama Administration
Yeah, we don't know what it is either. We suspect not even Lisa Jackson knows. But of course, that doesn't keep the chattering class from speculating about what will or won't happen in the next four years on the energy and environment front. So without further ado….
Here's a pretty banal piece from the Hearst Chain that includes the premise the president is free "to approve natural gas exports and the controversial Keystone XL pipeline without fear of alienating environmentalists he needed at the ballot box."
Ah, but here's a piece from USA Today that quotes heavily from Romney supporters in industry to suggest the president will reject the pipeline and propose a slew of anti-oil and gas regulations.
Then there's this much longer and better Bloomberg piece that actually focuses on EPA rules already in the, er, pipeline, such as new lower Particulate Matter ambient air standards, the possibility of the lower ozone standard Jackson was originally going to propose before she got mugged by the White House re-election campaign, and new greenhouse gases limits for power plants.
It also mentions the possibility – brought up by industry lobbyist and Dallas native Scott Segal, no less – of a carbon tax as part of a solution to the "fiscal cliff" now getting so much post-election coverage, and talks about whether Lisa Jackson is staying or going.
Liberal thinktankers at Think Progress just posted this article advocating the "Five Essential" environmental rules that should be the focus of Obama's second term.
Finally, not mentioned in any article so far, but on the minds of kilnheads across the country, is the fate of the inane proposed revisions in cement plant emissions rules that were the subject of an August EPA national hearing at the Arlington City Hall that many of you attended. A final decision on those is due by December.
All You need to Know About TCEQ’s Commitment to Clean Air
TCEQ Can’t Handle the Truth Over DFW Air Plan Failure
Here's further proof that Governor Perry has transformed the world's second-largest environmental agency into just another extension of his on-going political campaign.
After waiting for a couple of days for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to say something about the failure of its latest DFW clean air plan to reach a 1997 ozone standard by the end of this "ozone season," Downwinders put out a release on Monday criticizing the agency for leaving the air dirtier than when the plan was begun in 2010.
To succeed, the TCEQ plan had to bring smog numbers down at all DFW monitors to 84 parts per billion or below by the end of this last summer, using three-year rolling averages incorporating readings from 2011 and 2010. The agency blithely predicted it would do just that and even published computer-modeled estimates of what the averages would be at the end of 2012. According to TCEQ we were supposed to see record low ozone levels this summer. So low that there would be no violations of the 1997 ozone standard for the first time since it was implemented.
Although the official EPA regulatory deadline to judge the plan a success or failure is June 15th, 2013, it's fate has already been decided by the data collected the three previous summers. That's important to know. TCEQ doesn't get another summer to prove that it's brilliant plan to sit back and watch people buy cars will work somehow, someway. The Clean Air Act only allows them three years to get their act together per plan. The clock started ticking in 2010. It stopped ticking on November 1, 2012, at the traditional end of DFW's ozone season. That was the practical deadline. All that's left to do is type up the report to EPA and submit it come June 15th of next year. They've run of of time.
But unless you've gone through this process before, or had been following the plan closely, you wouldn't necessarily know this. That was the case with Andrew McLemore, a reporter for the Fort Worth Weekly, who'd been assigned to follow up on the Downwinders release and e-mail the TCEQ for a response.
What TCEQ spokesperson Lisa Wheeler said to McLemore was that of course the agency never claimed to be able to meet the goal by 2012. We said we'd do it by June of 2013 – the regulatory deadline. Ohhhhh.
This is a great answer for a term paper that's late, but not so much when there's no more summers between now and June of next year to use in your clean air plan. Ozone data for November to June isn't going to do you any good because (unless global warming really accelerates) that's not the time of year we see high ozone numbers. And the plan has to use the highest of the high numbers. Telling McLemore that everyone had to wait until June to know the final results of the DFW air plan was like telling him to wait for the cake to cool for eight months after its' already been taken out of the oven. The thing is done. It's not getting any bigger, or sweeter-tasting, or rounder. It's not changing character or content. It is what it is right now.
TCEQ knows this. Lisa Wheeler knows that there will be no new numbers to add or subtract from that will make any difference. There will be no 2013 average that they can use to change the results from what they are at this moment. It's all already been determined by this summer's miserable showing, and the miserable showing before that in 2011. That's what makes this answer of theirs so incredibly cynical.
Wheeler apparently wanted to confuse McLemore, in essence saying, "Gee we really didn't fail yet – you have to wait until next June to conclude that. We still have time to change the outcome! " But because the data won't change, the results won't change either.
Don't take our word for it. TCEQ has a whole web page devoted to chronicling the proof that the DFW air plan has already failed – http://www.tceq.state.tx.us/cgi-bin/compliance/monops/8hr_attainment.pl
You'll notice this page, titled "Compliance with Eight-Hour Ozone Standard" has only three columns of data, one for 2010, one for 2011, and one for 2012. No column for 2013. You'll also notice that at the end of that three year cycle, there are two sites with running average that are at or above 85 ppb. The results are in. TCEQ's second clean air plan for DFW to reach the old 1997 standard in the last four years has failed. TCEQ just can't man-up and say so.
Not only has it failed. It's actually left DFW air dirtier than when it began. Here's why:
– Two monitors now have a three year running average (design value) of 85ppb or more. This is the same number as 2010, so no change at all on that front.
– The three year average for the region's highest reading actually went up 1 ppb from 2010 (86 ppb), to 2012 (87 ppb), with a spike of 90 ppb last year. Worse than 2010.
– Six monitors saw a violation of the 85 standard this summer by posting a 4th highest reading that was 85 ppb or above. Only one monitor did that in 2010. 2012 is five times worse than 2010 by this measuring stick.
– The location of those violating monitors is of concern because they moved further east from the northwestern corner of Tarrant County where they'd been "contained" – all the way into central Dallas, where the "Hinton St. monitor" near Mockingbird and I-35 recorded a 4th highest reading of 85 ppb or above for the first time since 2005. Also proof things have gotten worse, not better.
So the latest TCEQ DFW clean air plan achieved the following: More numerous and geographically-dispersed violations, with an increase in average levels of air pollution that takes it further away from the 84 it needs to achieve, instead of bringing it closer.
Heckava job.
To fully appreciate the agency's mendacity in its public approach to this failure, all you have to do is ask yourself how TCEQ would have reacted had it somehow achieved the miraculous decrease in air pollution its clean air plan promised. Go look at the front page of the TCEQ website. It has almost as many diatribes against the EPA as it does real environmental policy news, including opinion pieces written by TCEQ Commissioners. Do you think the agency would have waited until June 15th, 2013 to trumpet its success just because of a meaningless, bureaucratic deadline? Neither do we.
The TCEQ is never going to be a trustworthy source of information or expertise in the fight against DFW smog again while Governor Perry is in office. The sooner local officials wise-up and chart their own path, the better.
2nd TCEQ Clean Air Plan in Four Years Fails, Leaves Air Dirtier
For the second time in four years a state-designed clean air plan to bring safe and legal air to DFW residents has failed, missing its goal by an even wider margin than on its first try, and leaving local air quality worse than when it started.
November 1st marked the official end of the eight-month 2012 ozone season. According to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or TCEQ, its plan was supposed to deliver record-breaking clean air to DFW this summer on its way to bringing the region into compliance with the Clean Air Act for the first time in two decades.
Shocking Study: Air Pollution Regulations Improve Public Health
One of the most basic arguments of industry opponents of clean air regulations is that they really don't do that much to improve public health. Given all the studies concluding that increases in air pollution lead to increases in illness and death, this argument is every bit as plausible as denying global warming at this point. But that doesn't stop industry and their supporters in elected office quit trying.
Out of New York and via the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology comes a three year study (2004-2006) that tracks decreases in ozone pollution to increases in public health, specifically fewer hospital admissions for respiratory problems. Overall, a decrease of about 9% in ozone pollution lead to an 11% decrease in hospitalizations. That's significant, bordering on one-to-one percentage point drop.
The study followed the progress of the EPA's NOx Budget Trading Program (BTP), a cap and trade system established for East Coat states to help them reduce their ozone, or smog pollution, that ran from 2004 to 2008, when it was replaced by the older, Bush-era version of the EPA's cross-stare pollution rules. It looked at all of New York in terms of eight regions throughout the state. Drops in smog averaged 9% but were substantially lower during the critical summer "ozone season."
According to the folks at the Environmental Health News:
"Regulations do work to lower pollution, which in turn can improve respiratory health.
Ozone levels decreased across the state of New York and hospital admissions for respiratory disease dipped in half of the regions studied after the EPA's regulatory program started. There were also notable decreases in hospital admissions for certain respiratory illnesses, most age groups and most health insurance groups.
The reduced admissions for those on public assistance suggests that low income residents may have benefited the most from air quality improvements. This would be an important achievement since this group often experiences the highest air pollution exposures.
These results are consistent with the limited number of other studies that compare pollution levels and health before and after required air pollution reductions."
It says more about the opposition to new regulations that we still have to have studies proving that less crap in the air means less illness and death. This has been a settled scientific fact for some time. But Industry pays big money for it to be a still-disputed political fact.
2011 was the Worst Year for Smog since 2006 in DFW. 2012 Is One Bad Air Day Away Matching It.
Last year's air quality death spiral in DFW was sometimes explained away as an anomaly because of the severe drought the entire state was going through.
So what's the explanation this year?
With yesterday's high ozone levels sending a 6th monitor into an exceedance of the old 1997 85 parts per billion smog standard, DFW is just one more bad air day away from matching last year's dreadful results. Today's ozone forecast says there should be no high levels of smog in DFW today, even as the temperature reaches for a record high. But then again, they weren't predicted Thursday either.
To give you some idea how rapidly things have gone downhill for air quality in DFW the past two years, just look at the annual numbers. From 2007 to 2010, we had a total of nine monitors register official exceedances of the 85 ppb standard. That's about two monitors a year average. This turns out to be the closest we've ever come to actually meeting the standard. Officials could argue with some justification that air quality was slowly getting better.
On the other hand, during the last two years, we've had 13 monitors record exceedances of the 85 ppb standard, an average of 6.5 a year, and 2012's ozone season is not yet over. You could add up all the exceedances from the four years between 2007 and 2010 and still not equal the number we've experienced in just the last 24 months.
This is not progress.
TCEQ and the gas industry have argued for some time that gas mining couldn't possibly be contributing to smog problems since smog levels were going down as drilling was increasing in DFW. But that's not true anymore. As gas drilling has moved further and further east – into the heart of the non-attainment area, we've seen in increase in ozone concentrations, in exceedances in monitors, and monitors in the eastern part of the Metromess exceeding the standard that hadn't done so in five to seven years.
Meanwhile all other major source categories for air pollution have been decreasing their emissions. Cars, power plants and cement kilns are actually releasing less air pollution now than they were ten or 20 years ago. Only one large specific source category has increased its annual tonnage significantly over that same time – oil and gas.
Is it just a coincidence that smog is getting worse as oil and gas pollution skyrocket – not only in the Barnett Shale that surrounds DFW on three sides, but by all the new oil and gas sources now southeast of Dallas as part of the Haynesville Shale play that are blowing their pollution toward us most of the ozone season? There are now so many gas compressors in Freestone County, less than 75 miles away from the Dallas County line, that their emissions represent the equivalent of over 4 new Big Brown coal plants. What do you think the impact on air quality would be of four large new coal plants located immediately upwind of DFW? Might it look a lot like it does in 2012?
Could it be that the dirty mining of "clean" natural gas is making it impossible for DFW to meet the old 85 ozone standard, much less the new 75 ppb one? That the Devil's Bargain so many former and current elected officials made with the gas operators to grab the cash and run is now coming back to bite them and us in the air quality butt? That was certainly the conclusion of the study we publicized this last Tuesday from the Houston Advanced Research Center:
"Major metropolitan areas in or near shale formations will be hard pressed to demonstrate future attainment of the federal ozone standard, unless significant controls are placed on emissions from increased oil and gas exploration and production….urban drilling and the associated growth in industry emissions may be sufficient to keep the area (DFW) in nonattainment."
It's time for local officials to replace those cash registers in their eyes with gas masks. Because of their rush to make money, they didn't pause to understand how so much new industrial activity could produce smog just like the bad ol' days. They were being paid not to understand. And now 5 to 6 million people who still can't yet breathe safe and legal air are paying the price.
Study: Gas Drilling “Significantly” Increasing DFW Smog
In the middle of another bad North Texas ozone season, a new study by a Houston research consortium concludes that Barnett Shale natural gas facilities "significantly" raise smog levels in DFW, affecting air quality far downwind.
According to the study, ozone impacts from gas industry pollution are so large, they'll likely keep North Texas from being able to achieve the EPA's new 75 parts per billion (ppb) ozone standard.
Author Eduardo P. Olaguer, a Senior Research Scientist and Director of Air Quality Research at the Houston Advanced Research Center, concludes that, "Major metropolitan areas in or near shale formations will be hard pressed to demonstrate future attainment of the federal ozone standard, unless significant controls are placed on emissions from increased oil and gas exploration and production….urban drilling and the associated growth in industry emissions may be sufficient to keep the area (DFW) in nonattainment."
Olaguer's article describing his study was recently published in the July 18th edition of the Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association. It's the first independent study to examine specific North Texas ozone impacts from the gas industry.
Environmental groups say air pollution from natural gas sources is already making it impossible for DFW to meet even the obsolete 15-year old standard of 85 ppb. So far in 2012, five monitors have violated that level of smog despite a state plan that Austin guaranteed would reduce ozone concentrations in DFW to record lows this year. Counting 2012's failure, DFW has been in continual violation of the Clean Air Act for its smog pollution since 1991.
"This study is proof we need a regional strategy of self-defense to reduce air pollution from the gas industry," said Downwinders at Risk Director Jim Schermbeck, whose group has been leading the fight to reduce smog-forming pollution from gas sources for two years now. "TCEQ and EPA are not doing enough to rein-in these facilities. Despite their official plans, our air is getting dirtier, not cleaner because gas pollution is still under-regulated. It's time for us to do more at the local level."
Schermbeck suggested the study could make a difference in the upcoming city council vote on a new Dallas gas drilling ordinance.
"Dallas has a chance to react positively to this new evidence by adopting the nation's first policy aimed at mitigating the tons of new pollution caused by gas mining in its new drilling ordinance. That would be a very large step forward in advancing regional clean air goals."
A city-wide coalition of neighborhood, homeowners, and environmental groups has been urging the Dallas city council to require gas operators to reduce as much air pollution as they release through funding of anti-pollution measures across the city. The Houston Center study gives them a lot of fresh arguments.
According to it, "…oil and gas activities can have significant near-source impacts on ambient ozone, through either regular emissions or flares and other emission events associated with process upsets,and perhaps also maintenance, startup, and shutdown of oil and gas facilities."
In fact, just routine emissions from a single gas compressor station or large flare can raise ozone levels by 3 parts per billion as far as five miles downwind, and sometimes by 10 ppb or more as far as 10 miles downwind.
Those impacts rival the size of smog effects traced back to the Midlothian cement kilns or East Texas coal-fired power plants by previous studies.
As the study notes, "Given the possible impact of large single facilities, it is all the more conceivable that aggregations of oil and gas sites may act in concert so that they contribute several parts per billion to 8-hr ozone during actual exceedances."
This conclusion directly contradicts the stance of the Natural Gas industry and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, both of which deny that Barnett Shale gas emissions are large enough or located in areas that can influence DFW ozone levels.
But the Houston study is based in part on data collected by industry, as well as information from the city-sponsored "Fort Worth Study," and citizen-sponsored testing in the town of DISH in Denton County. It also uses a kind of computer modeling that allows for a more realistic understanding of how large releases from gas facilities can increase ozone pollution than the one the TCEQ uses. It's the most sophisticated challenge yet to the state and industry's claim that gas emissions do not constitute a large threat to DFW air quality.
"This is reality-based science, not the ideologically-influenced happy talk that's coming out of TCEQ these days," said Schermbeck. "Local governments in North Texas, especially those that are traditional allies of clean air, need to pay close attention and act on it."
The report is available for downloading here.
Study Links Utah’s “Wintertime Ozone” with Gas Patch Pollution
The rural Unita Basin in Utah has had some of the worst smog in the nation – in the middle of winter, with snow on the ground. That's not supposed to happen, but 10,000 gas wells, along with car and truck traffic combine to make it happen. A new $5 million study confirms that the smog-forming gas patch pollution is a major cause. "That seems to be a pretty strong link," said the study's main researcher.
Isn't the fact that there's that a smog problem in rural Utah where none existed before fracking began sufficient evidence of the link between fracking and smog to warrant cities already suffering smog problems like Dallas to take precautions before the open the door to fracking in the city limits?
The Perry-TCEQ Plan for Cleaner Air: More Coal
When it rains, it pours, or in this case, spews.
After getting a favorable ruling that struck down the EPA's flexible permit system last week, Team Perry seemingly scored another victory for its friends with Tuesday's ruling against the cross-state pollution rule.
Written by the Obama Administration to replace a similar Bush Administration rule that also got struck down by the courts (but is now back in at least partial effect…it hurts to think about this sometimes), the cross-state pollution rule was an attempt to federalize the problem of continental air pollution, much of it caused by big ol' dirty coal plants like the ones in East and Central Texas.
Texas can't regulate the coal plant pollution that wafts in from Illinois or Kentucky. Likewise, New York can't regulate Ohio facilities that send air pollution over its state lines. A federal solution covering all 50 states is required. Tuesday's ruling agreed, but concluded EPA hadn't given Texas and other states more time to come up with their own strategies to cut air pollution from coal plants. Maybe EPA was influenced by the fact that at the same time this strategy was being proposed, Governor Perry was rolling out plans to help streamline the permitting of 17 new coal plants in Texas.
Neither one of these rulings is as dreadful as it might seem at first. Both can be appealed. And both have mitigating circumstances that cushion the blow. With the flex permit case, all the facilities in Texas got standard operating permits eventually, making the ruling on the flex program itself moot. With the cross-state pollution rules, the Obama EPA itself said that two-thirds of all the health benefits from the rules had already been achieved with the partial implementation of the Bush rules they were meant to replace.
However, the cross state rules were not only supposed to be good in their own right, they also are the underpinning for a couple of other national pollution initiatives, including helping communities meet the new Ozone standard of 75 parts per billion, and the new, lower Particulate Matter pollution standard. Without the rules, these standards will be harder to achieve. And guess who's own plans begin to get mucked up by that failure? You guessed it, the state of Texas.
Because in the case of DFW's chronic smog problem, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality had already factored compliance with the rule into its already obsolete 2012 clean air plan for the Metromess. That was one of the reasons we were going to see the lowest ozone levels ever recorded in DFW this summer. Without that backstop, it's going to be hard not only to just meet the old 1997 ozone standard of 85 ppb – something DFW has yet to do despite two official tries now over the last seven years – it's going to be hard to meet the much lower standard of 75 ppb.
If you've seen the TCEQ propaganda of the last couple of years, it touts how much pollution totals in Texas have decreased. The Commission uses these numbers to then promote the Perry Team philosophy of limited government intervention, suggesting that it's the TCEQ and Perry responsible for those declines. They are not. For the most part, what the state is touting are the results of federal programs that have decreased pollution systematically across the country – everything from new fuel and pollution standards for cars and trucks, to new federal standards for specific industries, like refineries and chemical plants. Throw in the things that federal citizen suits and pressure got done despite TCEQ – think cement plant pollution reduction in DFW for example – and you have most, if not all of the things reducing pollution in Texas that TCEQ is claiming credit for.
Without the cross state pollution rules, the oldest and dirtiest coal plants in Texas will continue to operate for the foreseeable future. And when the wind blows, some of their pollution will be breathed-in by DFW residents. In the short term, this is Team Perry's trophy for all you hard-working Texas residents – more crap in your lungs.
If the state keeps clearing away all the federal programs that have actually reduced pollution over the last 20-30 years, those total pollution numbers won't be going down much longer. They'll be holding even and then going up. Left to their own devices, Team Perry would have us living in a polluter's Pottersville. And then who will the Governor blame?
Industry’s Man in the White House
Not very many citizens realize the process that proposed environmental regulations have to go through in any administration in order to get out and published in he Federal Register in one piece. Not only does the regulation have to pass through the EPA's own cost-benefit analysis and survive various Congressional and court challenges, it must also pass through a murkier and more subjective test administered by the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB.
OMB is the very last stop an environmental regulation makes. There are no environmental scientists at OMB to judge the necessity of the regulation. No, OMB's job is to make sure the regulation doesn't hurt industry too much. That may seem like a worthwhile goal, but without any kind of strict guidelines for how to judge that, the conclusion is often open to a lot of interpretation. Industry knows that OMB is its last shot at stopping a regulation that otherwise has broad support form the public and even EPA. Among the non-profit environmental activists in DC, OMB is known as the place regulation go to die.
That's how last year's decision to leave the new ozone standard at 75 parts per billion, rather than the 70 ppb that EPA scientists had advocated – got done. Same thing for a weaker Particulate Matter standard this year. And we can't prove it yet, but we bet OMB had something to do with the rollback in cement plant emission rules being proposed suddenly by EPA/.
The face of the Obama Administration's OMB has been Cass Sunstein, head of the OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), a powerful department that holds sway over federal agency rulemakings. Having done his damage in the first Obama Administration, he recently announced he was leaving his job and returning to academia. But not before the DC publication "The Hill" got its hands on the e-mails Sunstein sent on behalf of the US Chamber of Commerce to get last year's ozone pollution standard weakened. In effect, he becomes a lobbyist on behalf of industry within the administration after industry has already lost the public health debate.
"The response to The Hill’s FOIA request shows Sunstein played an active role in alerting White House aides to business’s concerns about tightening the ozone standards. Internal communications show that ahead of the September decision, Sunstein circulated strong criticism of the ozone rule from a pair of powerful business groups, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the Business Roundtable, as well as House lawmakers opposing the tougher standards."
On July 15 of last year, Sunstein sent DeParle and two other aides a copy of a letter from the Business Roundtable to Daley, saying it was “worth reading.” The business group also released the letter publicly at the time.
On July 26, Sunstein sent a wider group of aides — including senior energy adviser Zichal and Phil Schiliro — a column titled “The Latest Job Killer From the EPA” that Business Roundtable President John Engler penned in The Wall Street Journal.
An un-redacted portion of the message from Sunstein states, “I am sure you saw this but just in case.
On Wednesday, Aug. 31, Sunstein forwarded several aides — including Stephanie Cutter, now a top Obama campaign official — an op-ed that NAM President and CEO Jay Timmons penned in The Hill attacking the ozone rule."